Lisa's Laws: Love that Orange County Government Center

Sunday

Sep 30, 2012 at 2:00 AM

We were in California recently, and on the drive between San Francisco and Monterey we passed through several towns whose names I didn't notice. But I could tell we were going through towns because there were Home Depots and PetSmarts and Pier Ones.

Lisa Ramirez

We were in California recently, and on the drive between San Francisco and Monterey we passed through several towns whose names I didn't notice. But I could tell we were going through towns because there were Home Depots and PetSmarts and Pier Ones.

These California towns looked so much like so many other places I've driven through, and they could have been the retail stretch of virtually any community, from Newburgh to Danbury to Orlando, with their anonymous big-box buildings, structures favored for their durability, practicality and efficiency. It's barely worth looking out the window when you pass though places like that; the view is almost always the same, from New Jersey to Florida to, well, everywhere it seems, that you eventually stop noticing anything at all.

But I always take notice when I drive through Goshen. The place looks like, well, it looks precisely like Goshen, with its monuments and spires and Lawyers' Row and my favorite, its Orange County Government Center.

Now I know it's not everybody's favorite structure, but I, for one, love it. Maybe it's because it reminds me of the ice cubes in the game Don't Break the Ice, which, incidentally, I am very, very good at on account of spending my college years working part time in a toy store in the Old Orange Plaza. Perhaps I like the Government Center because it's where I got my first driver's license and my first passport.

But I love the government center most because it is so defiantly different from any other building anywhere near it, and how despite of that it somehow manages to fit in amongst the historic 19th-century architecture for which Goshen is also noted. It's like an avant-garde college kid home for Thanksgiving seated at a table among aunts and uncles in pearls and bow ties — from a different era and embracing a different aesthetic, clearly, but part of the family nonetheless.

I know the roof leaks. I know the windows are drafty. I know it's easy to get turned around in there and end up in a courtroom when you were looking for the room with the maps, and that many people dislike the design even more than I admire it. I also know that it's a whole lot of fun to build a new building from scratch, to watch it rise and then cut a ribbon with an oversized pair of scissors.

But then what do you get? Maybe something glass and steel and corporate-y, like those fancy car dealerships near Paramus? Or maybe something big and new but with a charming, slightly vintage facade, like a Barnes & Noble?

I hope not. The government center is a rare and beautiful thing, unique and weird and provocative. Like our own Eiffel Tower, it's a bit surprising, maybe even jarring, but it's impossible to imagine Paris without it.

Yes, it needs a new roof, new windows and likely a whole lot more. It deserves it, even if it is a bit different. And because it is.